


All Things Ancient and New

by yuletide_archivist



Category: The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-15
Updated: 2008-12-15
Packaged: 2018-01-25 04:18:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1631135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sofia looks for new constellations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All Things Ancient and New

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Triskellian

 

 

Of course, the stars aren't really different. It's just a matter of perspective.

Night on Rakhat steals past like a thief, a blessed interlude of darkness when the three suns all lay down their heads to sleep. Sofia Mendes sits alone in the great, arching darkness and traces lines in the sky with a finger, connections in space, a picture that no-one has ever drawn.

Spending one's formative years in La Perla would probably teach anyone to step quietly, and she does her best not to look startled when a particular bundle of shadows coalesce into Emilio, barefoot and serious. He looks down at her for a moment, parsing, then up to the heavens.

"They look so strange," he observes, and settles down cross-legged a little distance from her, head still tilted back. "But most of them must be the same. I suppose Jimmy could tell us where all the constellations are."

"I wouldn't want to know," she says, and in the pale light she sees his eyes return to her, narrowing slightly. Not surprise (their corporate stocks of that are quite depleted anyway); he is filing something away in that singular mind. She sometimes thinks that to him, everyone is a work in translation.

"I suppose not." His fingers shift restlessly in the grass. " _Nuevo mundo valiente_. We can make up our own ones here."

She lifts her hand and points, there, there, there again. "The Great Green Guy," she declares. 

He nods solemnly, and copies her, hand flitting through the starlight like a bird. " _Si zhao_. I always saw flowers there, even at home."

"I wonder which one _is_ home," she says, and squints, as if expecting to see a little marble-swirl of white and green and blue hove into view, if she pays enough attention. It would still be the same colours, even if everything else had become twenty years less familiar.

"So you would like to know that?" Stop, consider. An anomaly in her grammar? She feels like she can hear the whirring gears of his mind, like the machine she made from it.

"You don't ever escape the past," she says, and remembers bombs, fire, a knife in her hand, Jaubert's eyes like a balance scale. "But it's not the only thing there is. I want to believe we can make something new here, something at least a little better."

"Not a very lofty ambition for a stargazer," he remarks, and chuckles. "Are we not going to build Utopia here, all God's best beloved children, teaching the universe to sing in perfect harmony? Where's your ambition Mendes?"

"I hardly think an old married couple and a trio of celibates would be much good for-" and suddenly she is glad of the thinness of starlight as her cheeks flush red. Emilio is silent, and she knows with a queer, weightless rush that he too is thinking of other harmonies, what seems like decades ago. The wine had been warm in her blood, the piano keys cool and smooth, the rising swell of comfort, company, almost more than she could bear. His voice, she thinks, sounded like the night sky.

And what would it mean, for the two of them to make some imperfect harmony (she is always a pragmatist), some home far, far away from home? He is a beautiful man, she saw that in a coffee shop in Cleveland, but it runs deeper than broad cheekbones, a fine sweep of dark hair. There is beauty in the way he works, in the order he can pull out of the apparent nonsense of Ruanja. She thinks of Mozart stealing Allegri's _Miserere_ from the Vatican at the age of fourteen; hearing it twice, he transcribed every note. Emilio will hold long, animated conversations with Askama over a stone, a bowl, a twisting root; he beamed like a new father when she put together her first sentence of English. He could be a father. He would understand a child like no other.

But the old patterns are still there. He and Marc and D.W. might all have switched to more comfortable clothing for Rakhat's long, warm days but the shadow of the soutane still hangs about him, a bond as firm as metal about the wrist, or the finger. The words of the liturgy roll like poetry from his clever tongue, a serenade to his unseen lover. The devotion in his eyes when the cup is raised is almost terrifying. Is she asking to have that turned towards her?

"See any more constellations, Mendes?" His tone is light, so deliberately not awkward that it makes her want to squirm (ridiculously).

"Plenty," she says in her best imitation, and they fall back into it, a simple game, two old friends in a new world. He sketches out the Little Kumquat, the Pilot (with one star askew, of course), the French Fry, the Running Runa. She draws him the Prowling Cat, the Spectacles, the Coffee Cup.

"A most inspiring one, that; I have yet to find a better use of _azhawasi_ on either world." His hands are cupped in his lap, a containing space. She could not dare to breach it. They sit in silence for what feels like a long time.

"So do you think we will build this utopia then?"

He blinks at this dangerous back-track, but does not seem greatly perturbed, silver light casting shadows across his mouth. "I don't know. There are some churches who are very concerned with a day when the world ends, when apparently God is going to turn up and put everything exactly as it should be, without a finger lifted on our part. That view is-" he pauses, as if sifting through fourteen languages' worth of insults "- not particularly Catholic. God is the architect, the foreman perhaps, but neither the architect nor the foreman will be lifting the bricks and mixing cement. But I don't think that God builds his kingdom on one world or the other. Maybe we will build a little part of it here. In the short time we have."

It's what one ought to expect from a man whose Messiah healed with wood-roughened hands, but the image slips into her mind like a grace note. He believes they are making the kingdom of God, seven motley strangers in a strange land. Must they still build to old designs?

"Come on. We ought to get some sleep."

He rises and the shadows shift across his face, remaking it, perspectives shifting. She wants to run her fingers along the high bridge of his nose. But she keeps her hands to her sides, and between them there is the same, familiar space. She is still seeing stars on the ceiling when the first sun begins to rise. 

 


End file.
